Packet switch networks are now being used to transport streaming media, such as video and audio from a media server to multiple receivers, such as computer terminals and Set Top Boxes (STBs). However, packet switched networks typically use a best effort scheme that may significantly delay or drop some packets. Retransmission schemes have been designed to retransmit the dropped or delayed media packets to receivers.
Unicast retransmissions of multicast streams is an attractive recovery technique when the errors are uncorrelated, such as errors occurring on the individual accesses branches connected to the receivers. This may include errors on subscriber access lines of a Digital Subscriber Loop (DSL) network. In these cases, the probability is small that the packet loss is due to errors on a shared link upstream of the branching to the individual receivers compared to the errors in the individual access links themselves. Conversely, unicast retransmission is a poor solution for either correlated errors or long burst errors. This is primarily because of Negative ACKnowledgment (NACK) implosion where many receivers request retransmissions of the same packets at the same time. The bandwidth multiplication of sending many unicast copies of the same repair packet may prevent packet repair.